Cargill in Turkey has now recognised IUF-affiliated Tekgıda-İş, and negotiations towards a first collective agreement have started.
Cargill has a long history of union busting and anti-union discrimination. On 17 April 2018, 14 workers at Cargill’s starch plant in Bursa-Orhangazi were dismissed while trying to form a union. Turkish courts, despite company appeals, determined that the workers were unfairly dismissed, and ordered their reinstatement. Cargill stubbornly refused to reinstate them and contended that the workers were dismissed because the plant was forced to downsize. However, it appears that the plant had hired nine new permanent workers since December 2019 and had failed to offer these jobs first to those dismissed. Cargill has long resisted any attempts to establish workers’ representation; between 2012 and 2015, seven other workers were dismissed at the same factory for the same reason.
In January 2021, the UN Special Rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association wrote to Cargill as part of a UN special procedure to investigate allegations of abuses of human rights. In its reply, Cargill still purported that the seven earlier dismissals in 2012, 2014 and 2015 involved employees “all of whom separated under unique circumstances and none of whom were discriminated against based upon their union status”, in clear contradiction with the decision of the Turkish Supreme Court.
